Lyme Disease At-A-Glance

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Leaf-pile season is upon us (for most of us, anyway) and Lyme disease gets a second wave of bitiness around now.

  • Prevention is far better than cure for this, including:

    • Being aware of high-risk areas and high-risk activities

    • Dressing for the occasion (boots and long socks are your friends, as are long-gauntletted gloves if gardening)

    • Checking for ticks regularly, and if found, removing them carefully with tweezers

    • Getting medical treatment quickly, if a tick bite is found, or symptoms (such as the characteristic bullseye skin markings) appear.

      • Antibiotics are the only known effective treatment, and time is of the essence

  • If you miss all that, though, there are things you can do to at least hasten your recovery

    • See our main feature for more on that!

• Processed foods have less fiber, and food with the fiber stripped tends to have less taste too. Nuts are no different!

  • Today’s sponsor, Karma, are offering cashews like you (probably) haven’t had them before. An already delicious and nutritious snack, now scrumptiously seasoned (or plain!) but without their fiber being stripped.

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

These two habits actually make weight loss stick

We’ll try to summarize in the timestamp menu below, but highly recommend watching the video, as Richa is not only an excellent and entertaining storyteller, but also, she packs in a lot of real-world factors that most weight-loss/fitness guides like to gloss over and pretend don’t exist or are “just excuses”—and how she gets around them:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

The two habits (drumroll please…)

• 0:39 | Get lazy (stop trying to do everything at once; pick just one or two things to introduce at a time)

• 5:45 | Get real (have a backup plan to keep things at least more or less on-track when life gets in the way of your primary plan)

❓ MAIN FEATURE

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small 😎

❝I would prefer not to have to watch a video to get the info from the video. Sometimes a transcript is available. Would you be able to present the transcript for every video in the newsletters?❞

We would love to! But for now (sadly!) no, we are not able to do that. We’re a small team, and there just aren’t the resources for it at this time. And if we had the resources to do transcriptions, we’d still need a new system for hosting them somewhere else, or else they’d make our newsletters far too long. However:

• When there are transcripts provided, we’ll always link them.

• If there’s a text-based resource page (recipes sometimes have this) provided, we’ll link that, too.

• If a text-based recipe is provided in the video description and is short, we’ll copy that text into the newsletter. If it’s long, we’ll tell you where to find it in the description, because we only have so much space here.

• When the contents can be at least somewhat summarized in the timestamp menu, we’ll do that too.

  • For example, we don’t believe in clickbait and don’t think you should be subjected to such either, so we’ll do our best to “spoil” any teased “secrets”.

• We try to keep videos on the short side of things.

• We will never post videos that don’t have at least automatic closed-captioning available.

Quick tips: if you use the little “settings” menu found in the bottom-right of YouTube videos, you can:

• Turn on closed captioning if not already activated

• Turn the video speed up to 2x, to make the video take half the time to watch

❝Good info as always…was wondering if you have any recommendations for fighting Lyme disease naturally along wDr advice? Dr’s aren’t real keen on alternatives so always interested. Thanks❞

That depends on whether we’re looking at prevention or cure!

Prevention:

• Try not to get bitten by Lyme-disease-carrying ticks. Boots and long socks are your friends. As are long-gauntletted gloves for gardening.

• If you are in a high-risk area and/or engage in high-risk activities, check your body daily.

  • This is because it usually takes 36–48 hours of being attached for a tick to cause an infection

  • Obviously best if you can get a partner or close friend to help you with this, unless you have mastered some advanced pretzel positions of yoga.

• Contrary to many folk remedies, the safest way to remove a tick is with tweezers (carefully!).

• If you find and remove a tick, or otherwise suspect you have developed symptoms, go to your doctor immediately (not next week; today; time really counts for this).

Cure:

• No. Sorry. Regretfully, antibiotics are the only known effective treatment.

However! As with almost any kind of recovery, getting good rest, including good quality sleep, will hasten things. Also sensible is reducing stress if possible, and anything that could worsen inflammation.

Read: Beyond Supplements: The Real Immune-Boosters!

📊 POLL

We turn the tables and ask you a question…

We’ll then talk about this tomorrow:

❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

You probably haven’t had cashews like this before

Processed foods have less fiber, and food with the fiber stripped tends to have less taste too. Cashews are no different! But these ones are.

Karma Nuts is home of the “wrapped” cashew, which retains its natural skin for 2x the fiber, antioxidant activity comparable to blueberries (a famously top-tier source of such), and an amazing taste and crunch!

Their range of 11 varieties (plain, plus assorted seasoning variations) are all air-roasted with no added oil. They’re also gluten-free, vegan, kosher, and Non-GMO Project Verified, making them the perfect healthy snack for every occasion*

*this writer would like to humbly suggest they make a great appetizer snack to enjoy while cooking, which also means pre-loading with fiber, which is great for blood sugar health, and protein, which starts the feeling-of-fullness clock ticking and helps avoid overeating at dinner.

Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

🌏 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• An implantable insulin-making device could enable injection-free control of diabetes

• Long COVID linked to multiple organ changes, research suggests

• Rare genetic variants involved in male-pattern hair loss identified

• Photobiomodulation in sleep has more therapeutic effects for Alzheimer's disease than in wakefulness

• AI that interprets brain waves has the answer to lifting depression

• Certain gut microbes may be linked to skeletal health

• Eat beans and scratch your own back: expert advice on how to age better

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

The Body: A Guide for Occupants – by Bill Bryson

Better known for his writings on geography and history, here Bryson puts his mind to anatomy and physiology. How well does he do?

Very well, actually—thanks no doubt to the oversight of the veritable flock of consulting scientists mentioned in the acknowledgements. To this reviewer's knowledge, no mistakes made it through into publication.

That said, Bryson's love of history does shine through, and in this case, the book is as much a telling of medical history, as it is of the human body. That's a feature not a bug, though, as not only is it fascinating in and of itself, but also, it'd be difficult to fully understand where we're at in science, without understanding how we got here.

The style of the book is easy-reading narrative prose, but packed with lots of quirky facts, captivating anecdotes, and thought-provoking statistics. For example:

• The least effective way to spread germs is kissing. It proved ineffective among volunteers (in what sounds like a fun study) who had been successfully infected with the cold virus. Sneezes and coughs weren’t much better. The only really reliable way to transfer cold germs was physically by touch.

• The United States has 4% of the world’s population but consumes 80% of its opiates.

• Allowing a fever to run its course (within limits) could be the wisest thing. An increase of only a degree or so in body temperature slows the replication rate of viruses by a factor of 200.

Still, these kinds of things are woven together so well, that it doesn't feel at all like reading a trivia list!

Bottom line: if you'd like to know a lot more about anatomy and physiology, but prefer a very casual style rather than sitting down with a stack of textbooks, this book is a great option.

Click here to check out The Body, and learn more about yours!

Wishing you a safe and healthy day,

The 10almonds Team